A Walk With Giants
by Euterpe's Bard
Summary: Oneshot. Achilles is dead and goes to the Underworld, where he takes a walk with Hector. My attempt at them having a deep conversation.


Being dead is an unusual sensation.

One moment the pain in my heel was excruciating; I prayed that the end I knew was coming towards me on swift wings would come a little faster. Then my head hit the soft grass of the courtyard, and everything faded into darkness.

I'm not entirely sure how long I was unable to sense anything, but suddenly I was standing on the bank of a dark river. An old man holding the pole of a ferry was speaking to me.

"Two coins please."

Chiron's request caught me off guard at first.

"I-I'm sorry?" I stuttered. The boatman smiled kindly.

"Two coins, son," he repeated.

It was at this point when I became aware of a weight in my hand. I looked down and saw the fair that he demanded, which as custom dictated someone had provided for me. I dropped the coins into his wrinkled, outstretched hand and took my place on the ferry. As I looked around at the other passengers, it suddenly occurred to me that I knew several of them. The sleeping Trojans had obviously not been caught completely off their guard by our attack. Glancing to my left, I noticed an even more familiar face. I involuntarily snorted in disgust.

"Achilles," my companion said, without looking at me.

"Agamemnon."

A moment of toxic silence passed between us.

"I suppose you can thank your slave girl that I'm sitting next to you on Chiron's ferry," the former king of Mycenae told me.

"Whatever Briseis did to you," I snapped, "I'm sure you deserved it."

"And what about you?" he asked, finally turning to face me. "How did the indestructible warlord end up taking his final journey across the River Styx?"

"I was shot," I said honestly. Agamemnon laughed.

"Not so indestructible, it would seem," he mused.

I would have given a sharp retort, but at that moment I felt the ferry strike land, and the boatman spoke.

"Last stop," he wheezed.

Everyone on the ferry stood and shuffled off. Agamemnon turned to me.

"I suppose it will be impossible for me to ignore you forever." He didn't seem any happier about the thought than I.

"I suppose," I said curtly. He gave me one last terse glance and walked away across the bank.

I looked around again at the people that surrounded me. Most of them looked confused and frightened, and a few threw scared glances in my direction.

Another gaze a little further off caught my eye. A pair of dark brown eyes had been watching me since I stepped foot on the shore, and a bearded smile greeted me as I made my way through the other dead to stand before Prince Hector.

I looked to the ground and shuffled my feet awkwardly, unsure of what to say. I looked up, sighed, and crossed my arms while Hector continued to smile at me. It was this that unnerved me more than seeing my former adversary. I killed him, and the only reason he was even here was due to his father's begging; why on earth should he be happy to see me?

"Welcome brother."

If my heart had been functioning, I'm sure it would have skipped a beat. In every dream I had ever had about this place, the dead had spoken those exact words to me. I had only ever told my cousin Patroclus, so hearing the Trojan prince speak in such a way caught me off guard. Hector seemed to sense it, and smiled even broader.

"Come," he said, laying a friendly hand on my shoulder. "Walk with me."

We ambled on in silence for a while. There were several things I wanted to say, but they all whirled about my mind and became tangled up in each other, making it impossible to form a coherent sentence. Finally, I cleared my throat.

"I suppose I should apologize," I said awkwardly. Hector turned his head and smiled again.

"Why?" he asked. I looked back at him and became even more tongue-tied by his flippancy.

"W-well I…that is, you…it's my fault that…I killed you!"

He nodded.

"That's true," he agreed. "You did. If it will make you feel better, I forgive you."

We walked on, neither of us speaking. During this time I started to take notice of the scenery of the Underworld, and I cannot say it was comforting. We say Tantalus crying in the river, starving and thirsty, tormented by the water and fruit that eluded his grasp. Though I knew of his crimes, I still felt a sharp pang of pity for his fate. A while later we passed by Sisyphus, palms raw and bleeding as he continued his never-ending path up the hill with his boulder. I unconsciously rubbed my hands as I watched him put another bloody handprint on the rock.

"You're worried," Hector said as I paused to watch him. It wasn't a question, and I nodded.

"I committed crimes just as bad as theirs," I stated. "I confess I'm not anxious to discover my fate."

"Don't be frightened," Hector assured me. "You will not share in their doom."

Though I respected his judgment, I knew he would not be the one to determine what my punishment in Hades would be. Hector gave me a complacent smile again.

"You were undoubtedly a gifted killer in life," he said as we continued walking. "Many men have entered the Underworld because you sent them here, least of all me. But when Midas judges you, he will not condemn you to an eternity of torture because there is one distinct difference between you and those men back there."

"And what would that be?" I asked skeptically. I doubted whether anything I possessed would save me now.

"Compassion."

I looked back at the prince. Perhaps this _was_ my punishment; to spend forever walking with my former victims, letting them confuse me into a stupor.

"Compassion?" I asked. "I was a killer! You said yourself many of the men here were murdered by me, yet you say my saving grace is _compassion?"_

"Don't forget, Achilles," and as he interrupted it occurred to me that I had never before heard him speak my name. "Many of the men are here of my accord as well. We both ended many lives, and to be honest when I first came here I had the same inhibitions as you are now. But it takes more – or perhaps less – than that to join Tantalus and Sisyphus in their torment."

"Why do I find that hard to believe?" I muttered to myself.

"I believe it," Hector said. "You have more compassion than you give yourself credit for having. For example, you're worried that all the deaths you caused will come back to haunt you. That in of itself demonstrates that you have a guilty conscience about your violent past. I am here because I killed your cousin, so you were driven by compassion for his fate to enact your revenge. You were one of the few Greeks who did not want to harm my cousin Briseis when she was your prisoner, and the only one who grew to love her. One could say your entire life was dictated quite a lot by compassion."

I tried to wrap my mind around what he had said as we continued our walk. We had passed out of the darkest areas of the Underworld, and I could see that the air was getting lighter. There were more people here, mulling about and talking as they moved among the rocks that had plants and grass growing out of fissures. A pair of children ran across our path, laughing as they chased each other. Despite everything, I couldn't help but smile as I watched them.

"Whatever else I have done," I said, half to Hector and half to myself, "I can at least tell Midas that I have never killed a child."

"Out of compassion," Hector laughed.

"But why are they here?" I said quietly as they disappeared. "They're too young to even know what war is, much less be victims of it."

"It might not have been war," Hector pointed out. "It could have been some type of accident, or they may have gotten sick."

"But why? War, accident, or disease, they're still too young to die."

"We and many of our companions were too young to die," he said, "but it happened anyway. No one ever claimed the Fates were fair."

He gave a short laugh.

"Say what you will," he told me, "but had you escaped this war I think you would have made a good father."

"You already were a good father," I pointed out. For the first time during our walk, Hector's face fell and it was his turn to be nervous.

"I'm not sure if you would know," he said softly, looking down, "but…did they escape?"

"Your wife and son?" He nodded. "I believe they did."

He breathed a sigh of relief and smiled again.

"Good."

We had left the cave-like regions of Hades and emerged onto a field bathed in golden sunlight.

"The Elysian Fields," Hector said, waving a hand across the peaceful scene before us. "My final resting place, and yours."

I looked at him in shock.

"The gods are more forgiving than you think," he smiled. "They have granted you a place among the heroes."

As we strolled across the field, I began to see more people. Some of them I recognized: Hercules, the great laborer whose parentage had earned him the animosity of the queen of the gods; Theseus, defeater of the Minotaur; Perseus, who purged the world of Medusa and the Gorgons. They looked up at us and nodded as we passed.

'_Of all places to be spending eternity,'_ I thought to myself, '_this won't be so bad. At least I probably won't run into Agamemnon here.'_

We came to rest beneath a grove of trees next to a stream that glistened in the sunlight. I leaned my head against the trunk of the tree and gave a contented sigh. I could tell my talk with Hector was coming to an end.

"I have one more question," I told him before he could depart.

"Ask away," he said.

"Why are we here?"

"Midas decided that we deserved to –"

"No," I said, turning my head to look at him. "Why do we deserve to be here, when we have created so much death and sadness in the world, but they probably never harmed another being? Why do we, men who were grown and ended so many lives, deserve to be in this place while those children do not?"

For once, the prince had no response. He sat and stared up at the cloudless blue sky, thinking over what I had said.

"I don't know," he finally said. "Perhaps we were not meant to know."

"It doesn't seem right," I murmured. He smiled again.

"Then again," he said, "perhaps that is why."

"Does this have to do with my supposed abundance of compassion again?"

He laughed.

"Your soul is judged on character," he told me, "not on actions. If your character is found to be pure, then so is your soul."

"But character and actions must have some bearing on each other," I pointed out. "Suppose those children's souls were not found, for some reason, to be as pure as mine or yours. If their actions never reflected it, shouldn't that count for something? They denied their own characters for the sake of those around them; that's got to be the same as being good at heart."

"Perhaps," Hector agreed. "But, then again, it is not our decision to make."

"Perhaps there should be a different system for determining such things."

He chuckled.

"Perhaps."

The prince stood and smiled down at me.

"This is where I leave you, Warrior Achilles," he said. "I must say, you will be a good companion to have for the rest of eternity."

"The same to you, Prince of Troy," I said with a nod.

He nodded and gave me one final smile before walking out of the grove by the stream. I turned my head and, closing my eyes, fell into the first truly peaceful sleep I had ever experienced.


End file.
